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Understandably, Cleveland is distraught over the Game 4 loss their Cavaliers suffered in Orlando Tuesday. Down 3-1, that's a big hole teams rarely fight back from. TNT touted that only eight teams in NBA history have ever came back to win series they trailed 3-1. On the surface, that's a long shot.But the Cavs, of course, aren't just any old team on the brink. Cleveland is a strong club, and there's actually a substantial probability the Cavs will win this thing.
Well, there's a substantial probability the Cavs will win this thing if you look at regular season performance -- all 82 games worth -- rather than the four games played in this series. While matchups play a huge role in the postseason, I tend to favor the greater data set the regular season provides.
This season, Cleveland had a Pythagorean winning percentage -- that's the team's expected winning percentage based on points margin, which ends up fairly close to actual winning percentage while differentiating between a 50-32 team who wins by an average of two points per game and a 50-32 team who wins by 10 points per game -- of 78.7 percent. Orlando's Pythagorean winning percentage was 72.3 percent. Home-court advantage in the NBA has been estimated at about 60 percent, based on the last several decades of data. That is to say if Team A and Team B are complete equals, Team A would be expected to win 60 percent of its home games against Team B, and vice versa.
We use these figures to estimate a win probability, or the statistical likelihood a given team will win a game. Based on these regular season figures and not taking into account the issues unique to this particular matchup, Cleveland has a 68 percent probability of winning Game 5 at home.
But Cleveland has to win two more home games ... and one in Orlando. And Cleveland cannot lose any of those three games. Cleveland's win probability in Orlando (again, based on regular season numbers) is 48.5 percent. What's the probability of a string of three wins against Orlando, two of the games at home?
That'd be about 22%. Far better than a puncher's chance.
For perspective, the Clippers had less than a 22 percent probability of winning the No. 1 pick in the 2009 NBA Draft. The Clippers won the lottery. Twice. (After the Clippers won No. 1, the balls were returned to the hopper and a new set was drawn. It was a Clippers combo.) So Cleveland definitely has a shot here.
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